Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Arnold considered Erna to be Fuchs’s mistress, although Robertson didn’t have that impression at first and noted for the record that no evidence existed. He later agreed with Arnold. Herbert evidenced no suspicions about the relationship—except on one particular day, when Fuchs and Skinner had a meeting at Shell Mex House and the relationship between the two men was very cool. The Watchers reported that they arrived at the Didcot Station separately, rode in the first-class car but sat apart, took the same tube car, but didn’t speak or sit together. They traveled back to Harwell separately. It was a complete break from their usual routine.

  The fracture, whatever its cause, didn’t last. The next day Fuchs visited the Skinners for a few minutes, and then they visited him at the prefab along with Herbert’s aunt Bess, problem seemingly resolved. The phone bugs offered no explanation.

  Other facets of Erna’s life Robertson did question. Very shortly he would learn that she had a distinctly peculiar set of friends. By month’s end, MI5 had a tap on the Skinners’ phone.

  * * *

  —

  Fuchs wasn’t the only prime suspect MI5 was following. Rudi Peierls was the other. Robertson already had mail and phone checks on Peierls, but other than maligning his sartorial display (“shabby raincoat with belt, dark grey soft hat with black band—brim turned up all round,” and so on), the Watchers didn’t report much. Then, on September 19, Martin wrote to Washington with an explosive finding. Peierls had a sister in the United States. This fact came from a 1938 letter supporting U.K. visas for his parents, who were traveling from Berlin to America. Having a sister in the United States was a key factor that came out of Venona. Now Fuchs wasn’t the only candidate for “Rest.”

  The FBI and the British embassy in Washington responded quickly, saying that the time frame in the Venona messages didn’t match Peierls’s movements. Namely, he took up a position in Los Alamos on July 1, 1944. The government was unlikely to consider transferring him back to the U.K. that same month. MI5’s director general, however, didn’t want the timetable embedded in the Venona messages, which might not fit exactly with the actual events, to dictate the possibilities. Most, though, still held Fuchs to be the guilty one.

  The presence of a sister was an essential factor. The exact details on Peierls were lacking as yet, but evidence on Kristel Fuchs Heinemann and her husband, Bob, crisscrossed between the embassy in Washington and MI5. London uncovered that in June 1937, Bob, then a student at Swarthmore, had visited the U.K. en route to Leningrad. And in 1944, the FBI learned that he had been a member of the Communist Party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, resigned, and rejoined in 1947 using the alias Robert Hill. Robertson requested any records on Kristel held by the Home Office, and a few days later he applied for a warrant to open mail from her. His minute on September 20 read,

  The address of FUCHS’ sister, Mrs. Kristel F. Heineman [sic], has now been obtained from the F.B.I. and is 96 Lake View Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts U.S.A.

  In view of the information in our records regarding this woman’s possible past implication in Russian espionage, and especially the fact that her name was found in a diary of the spy Israel Halperin, I should be grateful if you would approve the operation of a H.O.W. [a warrant] on all correspondence addressed to her from this country.

  It wasn’t long before Robertson requested that her letters be checked for secret ink.

  As the minute indicated, a week or so earlier a cable from Washington had spelled out another troubling fact about Kristel: her name was listed in the diary of Israel Halperin, the mathematician arrested for spying by the Canadians after Igor Gouzenko, a clerk at the Russian embassy in Ottawa who defected in 1945, had implicated him. In 1947, the courts acquitted Halperin, and he resumed his faculty position at Queen’s University in Ontario. MI5’s director general, Percy Sillitoe, wanted the FBI to investigate his movements between 1942 and 1945. He didn’t think Halperin could be the elusive “Goose,” the Russians’ code name for Rest’s courier in New York, but he wanted to make sure.

  Similarly, Martin pressured his main contact at the embassy in Washington, Geoffrey Patterson, to find Kristel’s whereabouts in 1944. Patterson pushed the FBI agents, and they pushed back. They had already worked for a week and found nothing. It was “extremely difficult,” Martin heard, to trace the movements of a U.S. national during 1944. So he abbreviated his request. Could they at least confirm that she was somewhere in the United States during that time? Was her husband connected with Harvard at the present time, and might Harvard have some information? Urgency pulsed through the request. Until the FBI sorted out the sisters of Fuchs and Peierls, MI5 couldn’t eliminate either man as a suspect. They had to cover them both around the clock, and the agency was stretched.

  * * *

  —

  On September 23, 1949, Harry Truman made a public announcement that confirmed the suspicions of Western intelligence and otherwise stunned the world: Russia had exploded an atomic bomb. The next day, eager to watch Fuchs’s reaction to the news, Arnold knocked on his door. It was around 11:00 on Saturday morning, and Fuchs was just stirring. Arnold started in right away saying that he had come around because of the news. He feigned confusion. “I don’t know what to make of this. Do you?” Fuchs simply replied, “Well we don’t—I mean, we want to know the details.” After a cigarette and twenty-five minutes of Arnold’s mostly one-sided conversation, he departed.

  CHAPTER 17

  Disposal, London, October 1949

  A few days after Truman’s announcement, Fuchs went to London for a top secret, two-day government symposium on the bomb. Arnold told Robertson that Fuchs “would almost certainly travel by train.” On September 27, from 4:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., the Watchers covered Didcot and Paddington stations, but they never saw him. Their first sighting was at 10:30 a.m., when he walked into the Royal Institute with another man whose features they couldn’t discern. They stayed in Fuchs’s shadow for the next thirty-six hours.

  12:45: lunch break, he came out, placed two calls from the post office nearby—one to the Great Western Hotel.

  1:00: hailed a taxi to 10 Herbert Crescent, just to the south of Hyde Park. There a woman, known to him, let him in.

  2:15: left for the Royal Institute.

  2:30: arrived there.

  4:55: left the meeting at the Royal Institute accompanied by another man. (One agent followed this man, J. V. Dunworth, to the Regent Palace Hotel where he occupied Room 757. MI5 later discovered that he was director of a division at Harwell and often roomed at the Skinners.)

  5:05: fetched his car at the Burlington House courtyard and drove back to 10 Herbert Crescent.

  7:45: left the house with the woman who had opened the door and another man and woman.

  The four drove to the nearby Blue Cockatoo Restaurant at Chelsea Embankment, a regular meeting place for London’s art scene.

  9:00: back at 10 Herbert Crescent where he spent the night.

  The Watchers ended their preliminary report with this:

  Wallace Russell HARPER, Ph.D. believed lives at 10 Herbert Crescent.

  Man from 10 Herbert Crescent who dined with FUCHS traced at 14:30 to Imperial College of Science and Technology, S.W.7. He works here.

  FUCHS is bad driver.

  Fuchs’s activities were completely unremarkable.

  Fuchs spent the next day at the meeting, and at its end at 6:00 p.m. he visited 52 Lancaster Close, St. Petersburgh Place just off Moscow Road, the city’s Russian section. The Watchers noted, “Several aliens live there including one whose name is (approximation) Eliezer Yapou.” Perhaps the surveillance had at long last paid off.

  Fuchs then returned to Harwell accompanied by a woman whom the Watchers guessed to be Mrs. Skinner. Erna’s phone call to a friend the next day confirmed this, along with details on Fuchs’s health. Erna told her friend that she was worried about him. He looked
“absolutely ghastly” and was easily winded, not able to walk up a few stairs without puffing. She had sent him straight to bed when they returned. She feared another bout of pneumonia. In the morning, she continued, he rested but felt compelled to go to the office after lunch. Herbert was away, and he needed to be there.

  * * *

  —

  The Watchers swiftly garnered facts on Russell Harper were accurate; he was the scientist he appeared to be. He earned a phone tap and a few days of observation because Fuchs and Erna had stayed at his house, but that was the end of it. Eliezer Yapou was different. Robertson quickly discovered that the Registry held a security file on him. According to that dossier, he was the Israeli press attaché in London and had contacts with the Russians, including journalists. He directed “the intelligence activities of the Israeli Legation, and was especially interested in acquiring information concerning Arab affairs.” He and his wife, Edith, an Austria-born art historian and friend of Erna’s, occupied the Lancaster Close flat in the Russian section. Robertson wrote to MI6 that it was time to intensify the investigation on Yapou.

  Erna’s friends concerned Robertson. It was she, he noted, who had initiated the few “contacts of any security significance” on the trip. Her somewhat bohemian circle was not well suited to the wife of the deputy director of a top secret research facility, disturbingly so. He requested the Registry to open a file on Erna and her friend Vera Pohle, who had suddenly turned up on another joint trip to London by Fuchs and the Skinners shortly after the one for the conference.

  Vera was about forty-five, from Berlin, and recently naturalized. She had trained in liturgical research and antiquarian literature and held several librarian positions in the U.K. For the last six months, MI5 learned, she had been “a domestic help and companion” to Erna. Erna had been diagnosed with anxiety, the main symptom of which was her craving for company and her panic without it. No specific cause was established, but it’s not hard to imagine why a Jewish woman living during the Nazi era might have developed “a case of nerves.”

  Vera Pohle was a new target for MI5, but a friend she shared with Erna had a security file. This was Tatiana Malleson, an actress who was originally from Russia, had lived in Germany, and was possibly a former member of the German Communist Party. Before leaving Germany, her then husband had been in touch “with a small Communist Party group within the Reichswehr [the German army], which included Hans Kahle.” She lived close to the “pro-Russian” Eliezer Yapou.

  Knowing nothing about MI5’s information, Arnold kept an eye on the visitors drifting in and out of the Skinners’ household. Because of them, he had his own doubts about Erna; moreover, he always kept in mind that “she is of German/Austrian origin.”

  * * *

  —

  At times the Skinners’ seemed like a boardinghouse. Vera came and went as part of her job as a companion; Tatiana spent the night there when seeing her son in Oxford; Genia Peierls came to visit; John Dunworth, a director at Harwell, lived there much of the time; and of course Fuchs was a frequent visitor. When Skinner’s aunt Bess came, Vera was shuffled into the Skinners’ dressing room to sleep. The constant flow of people provided Erna with the companionship that she desperately needed, but it was a headache for Arnold.

  Robertson kept up with phone taps, mail warrants, and an occasional observation of Erna’s friends. They revealed nothing against Fuchs. But the sudden surge of contacts to follow was overwhelming, which required the setting of priorities: (1) Fuchs with twenty-four-hour surveillance; (2) Mrs. Skinner (to be followed anytime she left Harwell because of “obscurity of her past history, her intimate association with FUCHS and the fact that she visited with FUCHS the flat of Dr. Eliezer YAPOU”); (3) Yapou; (4) Peierls.

  When Priority 1, Fuchs, made contacts, Robertson established secondary priorities. His rule of whom to follow was this: determine the identity of the contact and report it to Robertson immediately. If he determined the contact significant, this contact became Priority 1 at the next meeting with Fuchs and required all available resources, even “if necessary” to cease observation of Fuchs.

  Numerous other people and data cluttered the investigation timeline—significance unclear. There was Simmons, Fuchs’s dentist; Frank, his doctor; and Duke, a friend. His cousin Gisela Wagner, who lived in Frankfurt am Main, wrote to him about a visa for Britain. MI6 told Robertson she might have communist connections. He requested a mail warrant, including telegrams, on her—and Emil Fuchs too—with all letters “treated for secret writing.” In fact, Robertson ordered all letters to Fuchs from either the United States or any zone in Germany tested and stressed to leave no “trace whatsoever.” It was a precautionary measure, he said. He had no indication of secret writing. Furthermore, the delay in delivery was to be no more than “an absolute maximum of 48 hours.”

  Robertson also received Fuchs’s bank records. They listed no large deposits or withdrawals, but he had made out checks to the British Overseas Supply Company, a business based in Oxford that imported and manufactured drugs. It was run by a Polish-born, naturalized Brit. Information to MI5 from “a delicate source” said that it also quietly sent food packages to the Soviet sector of Germany. Was Fuchs sending food to relatives and friends, or was it something more sinister?

  For the most part the surveillance was monotonous. But the Watchers did report a curious trip to photography supply shops while Fuchs was in London for a meeting. He was looking for very small Kodak film. They didn’t know why.

  * * *

  —

  Like Robertson, Arthur Martin struggled to keep up, integrating information the FBI and the British embassy uncovered as well as feeding them MI5 discoveries. Odds were that Fuchs was Rest, but suspicions lingered about Peierls and even Skyrme. Until the FBI tracked the whereabouts of the sisters in 1944, Martin had no basis to exclude the other two men.

  One possible source of information was Frank Kearton, a chemist and one of the four British scientists in New York during the relevant time period. Perrin had described him in the meeting a month earlier as levelheaded and potentially useful to the investigation. Another option was to scour the administrative files of the British mission now held at Harwell. Martin went in that direction.

  * * *

  —

  The impassive edifice of Leconfield House masked a deeper problem—the exhaustion of the staff from twenty-four-hour surveillance. Martin crafted an honest and revealing letter to Geoffrey Patterson at the embassy in Washington:

  The elimination of either favorite defeats us. We had thought that with your help in tracing movements of relatives we should be able to clear this up quickly. Now that we realise your difficulties we are going ahead at this end on another tack which may yield the answer. But I must stress that until B.2.c. [Martin] can complete this task a tremendous strain is being thrown on B.2.a. [Robertson] (as I shall explain) so that anything you can do to help or hasten the F.B.I. is of the greatest importance. . . .

  I stress all this because it is the biggest and most thorough job we have ever undertaken and it is straining resources to the uttermost. Elimination of one of the candidates would reduce the strain and, more important, allow even greater concentration on the other and his contacts. Moreover, as you can imagine, time is limited.

  Martin didn’t hesitate to express his fear: that with no elimination of one of the candidates and nothing positive to report, MI5 and the government would pull back resources, and he and the other officers would have to stop the investigation.

  By return letter, Patterson wrote of his own troubling situation arising out of the Venona messages: “The FBI had launched 40–50 ‘grand scale’ enquiries and had ‘scores’ (I might not be too inaccurate if I said hundreds!) of spies to identify.”

  The investigation of Rest was important to the Americans, but they were focused on unidentified spies who could threaten U.S. security. The FBI had initiated a new
policy of giving out no information on current investigations. Patterson read that as an embarrassed reaction to “the new spies in their midst,” to which they didn’t want to admit. He now had to gather information unofficially from the agents with whom he was on good terms. Consequently, he spent part of most days at the bureau visiting and chatting. His after-hours activities helped to keep them loose and talking:

  I ply the boys with whiskey in the hope of oiling the investigation wheels. This system works quite well, but is really hard work and one wonders when one will ever get a decent night’s sleep.

  Patterson promised Martin to press the FBI for information. He also scoured the British mission’s files in Washington to pin down Peierls’s travels in the United States, and he cabled Martin a timeline. The decision to post Peierls to Los Alamos was made at the end of May; he left New York on June 2 for Albuquerque; he returned to New York on June 20; the report was dated June 6. Therefore, the MSN-12 report wasn’t finished before he left; it was handed to the Russians while he was away. His conclusion: “Peierls could not [R] NOT be identical with REST.”

  MI5 had conducted a six-week inquiry that had produced no evidence to use in a court case. On October 17, Martin sat down to draft another sobering memo, also to Patterson but with the director general’s signature. It described MI5’s strategy for “disposing” of Fuchs and requested Patterson to determine the FBI’s reaction. It was the step prior to MI5’s making a recommendation to the prime minister about whether Fuchs should be allowed to remain at Harwell.